Wall Street To Rags And Back

What happens when you're soaring high at the top of the stock market game and you suddenly lose everything...including your family, your home, your money, and your dignity? A thirty five year old Wall Street mogul discovers life at the other side of the looking glass when he is rendered homeless in New York City by his jealous peers. He's at the lowest of the low and is playing with the idea of suicide. Then, when it feels like all hope is lost, a chance meeting changes his life forever. A group of homeless people befriend the broken investor and start to help him get back on his feet. Inch by inch he began to crawl towards success again and leave ruin behind. There's one problem though. His old "friends" from Wall Street are still on the prowl trying to sabotage his last chance at a new beginning. Will he rise above this critical struggle and make a glorious comeback? Or will he fall miserably again at the hands of his wealthy enemies? Everything's at stake in this financial frenzy that will have you on the edge of your seat from start to finish. Find out his fate in this gripping page turner that documents one man's fight for survival against impossible odds on the frozen winter streets of Manhattan.

In this astounding account, Wall Street’s notorious bad boy—the original million-dollar-a-week stock chopper—leads us through a drama worthy of The Sopranos, from the FBI raid on his estate to the deal he cut to rat out his oldest friends and colleagues to the conscience he eventually found. With his kingdom in ruin, not to mention his marriage, the Wolf faced his greatest challenge yet: how to navigate a gauntlet of judges and lawyers, hold on to his kids and his enraged model wife, and possibly salvage his self-respect. It wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, for a man with an unprecedented appetite for excess, it was going to be hell. But the man at the center of one of the most shocking scandals in financial history soon sees the light of what matters most: his sobriety, and his future as a father and a man.

Twenty Years of Wall Street on Main Street is about the author's experiences working with myriad clients in just about every investment venue in existence. It also includes his observations of his peers and how they worked with the investing public and the use of various firm proprietary investment products to enhance firm revenue, often at the expense of the client's financial best interests. In the course of presenting his story, the author explains 20 years of financial market history and how that impacted his choices of investments for his clients. Additionally the author spends considerable time explaining the mechanics of investing through NYSE member firms including the rules of broker conduct, firm operations, the investment banking process, and how various firms exercised (or failed to exercise) their responsibilities in controlling broker misconduct. Finally, the text contains a wealth of information pertinent to investment decision making for investors of all levels of sophistication; a collection of necessary skills the author repeatedly demonstrated as a skilled practitioner under a multitude of difficult market conditions.

This special twelve-book bundle is a classical and choral music lover’s delight! Canada’s rich history and culture in the classical music arts is celebrated here, both in the form of in-depth biographies and autobiographies (Lois Marshall, Lotfi Mansouri, Elmer Iseler, Emma Albani and more), but also in honour of musical places (There’s Music in These Walls, a history of the Royal Conservatory of Music; In Their Own Words, a celebration of Canada’s choirs; and Opera Viva, a history of the Canadian Opera Company). Canada plays an important role in the promotion and performance of art music, and you can learn all about it in these fine books. Includes Opening Windows True Tales from the Mad, Mad, Mad World of Opera Lois Marshall John Arpin Elmer Iseler Jan Rubes Music Makers There’s Music in These Walls In Their Own Words Emma Albani Opera Viva MacMillan on Music

A blistering narrative account of the negligence and greed that pushed all of Wall Street into chaos and the country into a financial crisis. At the beginning of March 2008, the monetary fabric of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks, began unraveling. After ten days, the bank no longer existed, its assets sold under duress to rival JPMorgan Chase. The effects would be felt nationwide, as the country suddenly found itself in the grip of the worst financial mess since the Great Depression. William Cohan exposes the corporate arrogance, power struggles, and deadly combination of greed and inattention, which led to the collapse of not only Bear Stearns but the very foundations of Wall Street.

The ups and downs, the schemes and scams, the IPOs and hostile takeovers, the egos, the brilliance, the greed and the glory-this is the story of Wall Street, told by the men and women who made it happen. Once upon a time, Wall Street was just a footpath near the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Today it is the center of the financial world, the pivot point on which economies turn, companies rise and fall, and daring men and women go from rags to unbelievable riches, and sometimes back again. Along the way, Wall Street also has transformed itself and society, growing from an exclusive gentlemen's club to the place that millions of people now trust with their financial futures. Never has it been more important to understand how modern Wall Street truly works. And never before has the story of modern Wall Street been told by those who were there, personally, in their own words, uncensored, unfiltered, unbound. Now, in What Goes Up, acclaimed financial journalist Eric J. Weiner gives us the unvarnished, first-person truth in a riveting story based on hundreds of interviews with Wall Street insiders that captures the booms and busts of the past half century in America's financial capital in gripping detail. From Warren Buffett to Michael Milken, Sandy Weill to Henry Kravis, Peter Lynch to Alan Greenspan, from the birth of the mutual fund to the Internet bubble, from trading scandals to global meltdowns, from the rise of tycoons to the fall of giants. What Goes Up is a remarkable weaving together of larger-than-life characters and insider accounts. Eric J. Weiner has spoken to just about everybody-from CEOs to the barber in the basement of the stock exchange. For anyone who wants to understand how Wall Street became what it is, who wants to know how the biggest deals really happened, who wishes they had been a fly on the wall when it all went down, this is the book.

When Jimi Hendrix transfixed the crowds of Woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner," he was building on a foundation reaching back, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, and to the Delta blues tradition before him. But in its unforgettable introduction, followed by his unaccompanied "talking" guitar passage and inserted calls and responses at key points in the musical narrative, Hendrix's performance of the national anthem also hearkened back to a tradition even older than the blues, a tradition rooted in the rings of dance, drum, and song shared by peoples across Africa. Bold and original, The Power of Black Music offers a new way of listening to the music of black America, and appreciating its profound contribution to all American music. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music. Inspired by the pioneering work of Sterling Stuckey and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, advocates a new critical approach grounded in the forms and traditions of the music itself. He accompanies readers on a fascinating journey from the African ring, through the ring shout's powerful merging of music and dance in the slave culture, to the funeral parade practices of the early new Orleans jazzmen, the bluesmen in the twenties, the beboppers in the forties, and the free jazz, rock, Motown, and concert hall composers of the sixties and beyond. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices. Instead, he recognizes European influences, while demonstrating how much black music has continued to share with its African counterparts. Floyd maintains that while African Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. For example, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, who died a slave as a young man, the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet said, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. That's what the memory is....When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it." Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

They laid the foundations of American finance and defined the American brand of capitalism. They bankrolled wars, were the impetus behind the building of the first transcontinental railroad system, and fueled a fledgling nation’s grandiose dreams of empire. S&M Allen, J. P. Morgan & Co., Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers...they were the great Wall Street partnerships, and for well over a century, through a combination of financial genius, political chicanery, and the audacity of Caesars, they wielded unprecedented influence over the business, financial, and political landscapes of a nation. The Last Partnerships combines rigorous scholarship with journalism at its best to present a panoramic history of the rise and fall of the great financial houses—from the “Yankee Bankers,” at the turn of the 19th century, up to Goldman Sachs’ historic IPO in 1999—tracing their origins, their successes and failures over the years, and the reasons for their ultimate demise. The Last Partnerships is must-reading for history buffs and everyone interested in the world of finance behind the business-page headlines.